Amazon.com branded its micropayment-based crowdsourcing platform as the Mechanical Turk, borrowing one of the names of the 18th-century Automaton Chess Player as shorthand for the relationship that the system establishes between the cognitive labor force and the seemingly automated complex tasks. In both cases, the performance of the workers who animate the artifice is obscured by the spectacle of the machine.
The idea of the chess-playing machine, which was realized by IBM's Deep Blue computer in 1997 has been a key conceptual apparatus for imagining the automatization of the operations of the human mind since the Enlightenment era. This metaphor was also central for the idealization of cybernetic discourse as a universal system during the first half of the 20th century, embodied by the postwar symbol processors, which later became the architectural basis of the contemporary computer (Bowker1993; Shannon1950). In this chapter, I will study a neoliberal reincarnation of the chess-playing automaton, Amazon's Mechanical Turk, in the light of its early-modern legacy of configuring the relationship between the division of cognitive labor and the automatic systems of computing and control Particularly, in both cases, in varying degrees and methods, the labor performance of intellectual workers is an integral element of the disciplinary structure of the corresponding socioeconomicapparatus.
In the current configuration, this cognitive labor apparatus is situated within the neoliberal system of exception facilitated by the digital networks, taking advantage of legislative gray zones in the international labor regulations in order to maximize profits for multinational corporations (Ong 2006). Crowdsourcingis one of the most significantelements of this configuration that expands the reach of the neoliberal economy through cognitive capitalism,4 in which immaterial labor plays a key, structural role.⁵ Not surprisingly, this configuration also embodies some of the conflicts whose seeds are placed during the early modern conceptualizations of the mechanization of industrial labor through division ofcognitive labor. One of the most significant examples of this conceptualization was the chess-playing automaton that performed the insurmountable conflicts of the disciplining of the human mind for industrial production.
Docile Automata
Wolfgang von Kempelen's Chess Player Automaton was constructed and presented in 1770 at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and gave the impression thatthe pipe-smoking Turk mannequin, controlled by a sophisticated mechanism under the cabinet, could play serious chess against human opponents (see Figure 5.2). However, the seemingly mechanical mind of the Turk was actually manipulated by Kempelen's chess master assistant, who was hidden beneath the pseudo-mechanism. The Automaton Chess Player was exhibited for 84 years in Europe and the Americas and attracted many notable challengers and spectators, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Babbage, and Benjamin Franklin (Carroll 1975; Windisch 1784).
Return of the Crowds
81